


Rice and Storybrooke

by avulle



Series: Rice [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 10:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avulle/pseuds/avulle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Around her second week in Storybrooke, Emma Swan discovers that the supermarket has a remarkably excellent selection of hispanic food.  (Also known as the two times Emma Swan pondered the greatest mystery of Storybrooke, and the one time she finally figured it out.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rice and Storybrooke

Around her second week in Storybrooke, Emma Swan discovers that the supermarket has a remarkably excellent selection of hispanic food.

Especially considering that, as far as she can tell, Storybrooke has exactly _one_ hispanic resident.

She doesn’t _ask_ anyone about it, of course.

(Certainly not said hispanic resident.)

But she can never quite stamp down her curiousity.

Because she’ll never quite forget how Mary Margaret (the single palest human being she has ever met) says, “I’m feeling kinda lazy, how about—” and then proceeds to say a very long series of words in Spanish that Emma has no chance of ever remembering ever.

Or, when she gets sick (but not quite sick enough to think leaving Emma Swan in charge of her kitchen was a good idea), she pops out not-quite-ice-cubes containing what Emma is fairly certain is crack, makes rice and beans, and, when questioned, refers to it as “comfort food.”

She brushes it off as Mary Margaret being weird until David comes over, and they proceed to have a conversation that Emma is fairly certain consists entirely of Spanish nouns and English verbs.

So she then decided to brush it off as Storybrook, Maine being the _fucking weirdest town on the planet_ , and moves on with her life.

(She is right, of course—but not quite for the reasons she was expecting.)

 

After she accepts that magic is real, Regina Mills is the Evil Queen (surprise, surprise, everyone), Mary Margaret is her mother (and also Snow White and Regina’s stepdaughter and a variety of other colorful things), and the entire world is fucking insane, she returns to this particular oddity.

And she goes to her go-to man for all things weird about Storybrooke.

Henry.

And his big book of fairy tales.

She scours the book for some sort of Mexican inquisition into the Enchanted Forest (perhaps as revenge for the Spanish inquisition?).

She finds none, of course.

And when she goes about questioning people whose names do not begin with Regina and end with Mills about it, the only response she receives is the following question over and over again: “You mean people don’t eat like this everywhere in this realm?”

The first time she is asked this her response is “What?”

The second time she is asked this her response is “Yes.”

And by the third time, her response has returned once more to “ _What?_ ”

She is proud of herself for not asking, “How could you even—what?”

And then a lot of really complicated stuff happens, she ends up in New York without the memories of Storybrooke, the land of white people who eat hispanic food like they were born into it, and she forgets all about it.

For a while.

 

But, of course, it doesn’t last.

There’s a crisis involving green-skinned half-sisters, flying monkeys, and people who are not named Dorothy, and then there’s another crisis involving frozen trees, shattered mirrors, and melodramatic family drama, and then there’s third crisis involving... authors (what?), Mr. Gold being a dick, and maybe something about happy endings.

And after it’s all done, and she’s been living in Storybrooke so long that she calls chicken noodle soup sopa de pollo boricua, and spends a lot of time naked in Regina Mills’ remarkably comfortable bed doing things their son _never_ needs to know about, she’s finally decides enough is enough.

So, after a rousing bout of never-going-to-tell-Henry-about-this-ever with her co-parent and maybe-possibly girlfriend (occasionally, maybe-someday), Emma turns to an equally naked (and delightfully flushed) Regina Mills, and finally asks the big question.

“So what’s the deal with the Mexican food?”

There is a long moment when Regina Mills is stuck in post-never-going-to-tell-Henry-about-this-ever bliss, glazed eyes not-quite focused on the ceiling, before she turns to Emma and gives her what is quite possibly the most lethal glare Regina Mills has ever given anyone ever (ever when Emma was threatening to kill her or threatening to take her little boy away), and responds, “It’s Puerto Rican food.”

Emma opens her mouth to respond, _There’s a difference?_ , but stops herself just in time.

(She’s fairly certain this is the wisest choice she’s ever made.)

She waits (and possibly gives Regina a few more orgasms) until the death-glare from Hell has vanished before taking a deep breath, and trying again.

“So what’s with the Puerto Rican food?”

Regina then proceeds to tell a remarkably heart-breaking tale involving false memories and dead fathers and honoring them by making everyone love Puerto Rican food and not be racist against Latinas.

Emma _doesn’t_ tear up.

She _doesn’t_.

She just kind of blubbers into Regina’s shoulder and snuggles a little bit until Regina gets tired of it, and interrupts, “Yes. It was very delightfully poetic. And then, I elected to kill a man because I wanted his son, kill another because he got a hard-on for the new delinquent deputy, and then tried to murder everyone in this town because they interrupted my alone time with my son.”

And fuck if the fact Regina is an ex-mass-murdering sociopath doesn’t turn her on.

So they do more a lot of never-going-to-tell-Henry-about-this-ever, loud enough for everyone within a five-mile radius to hear them doing it, and Emma never wonders again about why Storybrooke is the town of white people who eat an awful lot of Mexican food.

(Puerto Rican food.)

(She still forgets, sometimes.)

(Just—never in front of Regina.)

(Because that’s definitely a fatal mistake.)


End file.
